Mercer International Inc. (MERC) Q4 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, and welcome to Mercer International's fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. On the call today is Juan Carlos Bueno, President and Chief Executive Officer of Mercer International, and Richard Short, CFO and Secretary. I will now hand the call over to Richard Short. Thanks, Shannon. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I will begin by touching on the financial and operating highlights of the fourth quarter before turning the call to Juan Carlos to provide further color into the markets our operations, and our strategic initiatives. Also, for those of you that have joined today's call by telephone, there is presentation material that we have attached to the investor section of our website. But before turning to our results, I would like to remind you that we will make forward-looking statements in this morning's conference call. According to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, I'd like to call your attention to the risks related to these statements, which are more fully described in our press release and in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Our operating EBITDA for the fourth quarter was negative $20 million, up $8 million when compared to the third quarter's results. This change in performance was largely due to stable production across all our mills and the benefits of our One Goal 100 program. However, market headwinds, including pricing, weak demand, and elevated fiber costs in both Germany and Canada, continued to weigh on our overall results. The current quarter's EBITDA also includes a non-cash inventory impairment of $23 million. In the fourth quarter, we recognized total non-cash impairment charges against our long-lived assets of $216 million,...